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YMMV / Geno Cyber

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  • Adaptation Displacement: The OVA is much more well known than the manga; then again, said manga is unfinished.
  • Awesome Art: Say what you will about the Gorn, it's still some of the most detailed and realistically drawn Gorn in cartoon history. The first person shot of the Genocyber tearing an android in half is especially jaw-dropping with both the frame count and the level of detail present. The mechanical designs are also genuinely impressive; the Genocyber itself looks like the Guyver as interpreted by Rob Liefeld.
  • Awesome Music:
  • Catharsis Factor: The teenage thug gang-leader from episode 1 is a rotten scumbag in every-way. He beats up Diana's young male friend, often for no reason at all, and later on when he and his two henchmen encounter Elaine and her friend, he sexually harasses Elaine and gets his two henchmen sexually molest Elaine's friend, so when Diana comes in and murders the gang-leader by stabbing him in the face with her claws before throwing him against a wall, it's pretty damn satisfying.
  • Complete Monster:
    • Original manga: Garnes Back is the development division manager of Tron Dynamic Corp. Seeking to use Professor Morgan's psychic teenage daughters Elaine and Diana for his own purposes, Garnes has his men sneak into Morgan's laboratory to kidnap him and his daughters, killing three guards in the process. Forcing Morgan to collaborate with him by threatening to either gun him down or kill his daughters first, Garnes allows Professor Kenneth Reed to painfully experiment on Elaine in order to awaken her Psychic Powers.
    • Anime:
      • Dr. Kenneth Reed, even worse than his manga counterpart, was an amoral research assistant to Dr. Nguyen Morgan. Arranging for Morgan and his wife to die, Kenneth takes their super-powered daughters for his own research. When a detective helping the girls hides them in a hospital, Kenneth and his goons slaughter the entire building, then capture the detective and gruesomely vivisect him. Even as he dies, Kenneth watches with glee as the girls merge into the titular Genocyber, destroying Hong Kong and killing millions in the process.
      • Mayor Grimson Rockwell is the corrupt, smug leader of the City of the Grand Ark, using his influence to cruelly keep most of the citizens as abused, starving slave labor while his upper class elite throw hedonistic parties, engaging in torture and trafficking of lower class civilians. When a large group of people try to rebel against Rockwell, he orders them massacred and thrown into mass graves before executing his own security chief for moving too slow in carrying out the exterminations. Rockwell's greatest act of villainy comes when he learns of a church taking in orphaned children and spreading the word of God and, declaring them to be a threat to his rule, has them all slaughtered in machine gunfire, leading to dozens of defenseless men, women and orphan children being killed where they stand in the church.
  • Cult Classic
  • Diagnosed by the Audience: Elaine's animal-like mindset and inability to speak has been compared to autism, though it's never made clear what her disorder is.
  • First Installment Wins: The first episode/story is widely considered the best.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Brazilians love this series, possibly because it was one of the first series to be shown in the popular "U.S. Manga" programming block in the now extinct TV Manchete. It was also the first ultra-violent, mature anime to be broadcast in the country in a reasonably big TV station: the Brazilians who watched "U.S. Manga" were in the 8 to 14 age range and, up to that point, the goriest thing was Saint Seiya or Detonator Orgun, which Genocyber managed to top on the very first episode. As if that wasn't enough for it to become a legend, the first episode was aired uncut (or darn near it) on the first run only, while the other episodes either weren't aired or were chopped senseless (and gore-less), and later reruns either didn't exist or were also chopped down; as a result, the series became some sort of an Urban Legend as not everyone watched it the first time around.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Crossed in the first episode by Dr. Kenneth Reed and his men at the hospital scene, the soldiers cross it in the second episode in the infamous "shredded children" scene; it certainly makes you feel much less sympathy for the soldiers when they start bursting into Ludicrous Gibs.
  • Narm: The shredded children, for some.
  • Nausea Fuel: The whole damn show.
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • The hospital scene, as well as a number of the more creative deaths.
    • The scene in which one of the teenagers tries to rape Elaine while the other two pull down the boy's pants and grab his penis. The molestation is bad enough in the original, where the boy is merely squeaking in discomfort, but in the dub he is horrifically screaming in pain.
  • Sequelitis: The third arc, due to the Time Skip, Mind Screw, Gainax Ending, atrocious dubbing, and most of the story following a relative bland couple, is the most hated part. The violence and infamous Gorn is also toned down significantly, for the viewers mostly interested in that. It may also explain why the last two episodes were never released in the UK, and why Manga UK refused to include them.
  • Squick: The series is infamous for this.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
    • The scenes with Elaine and the boy she befriends are exceptionally well animated, and legitimately poignant. If the anime had focused on developing their relationship, and not the extreme Gorn, Genocyber might have been something quite different than what its reputation holds it to be (Read: Mecha Elfen Lied).
    • The show as a whole has a very interesting concept and the potential to be something awesome. Unfortunately, the writers chose to focus more on making the show as violent and disturbing as possible, rather than focusing on character depth and making the actual story interesting and suspenseful.
  • Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The extremely graphic and disturbing violence, lack of any genuinely likable characters and incredibly nihilistic tone ended up turning a large number of people away from this series.
  • Took the Bad Film Seriously: The first three episodes have a pretty good dub from Manga UK, and most of the voice actors seem to be taking their roles seriously. The same cannot not be said for the dub of the last two episodes, which was dubbed by Central Park Media. Par for the course with CPM, most of the voice actors just phone in their performances with no real effort.

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